It's no longer about sawn-offs and balaclavas, its about constant probing, ddos, threat testing, malware, social engineering etc. The cat and mouse game continues but its now done with faceless teams from far away countries.

That's sort of my point. It would have been easy to do him if he'd done it to their face using a megaphone. Instead they've had to resort to the telecoms act to catch him. I guess ultimately it doesn't matter as they rightly got him.

"He was charged under the Communications Act 2003, for sending malicious communications that were grossly offensive." So if he'd used a megaphone and said to their faces they wouldn't have been able to charge him? Crazy laws.
What I see here is the fact that it's written rather than verbal is how they got him. Does it make a difference to the offended families involved how the trolling was done? I bet not, it's just another example of how free-speech laws have diverged from today's technology.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @03:24PM
from the stepped-out-for-a-minute dept.

gspr writes "On Sunday, Slashdot and many others reported that DRM-free games site GOG.com was shutting down. Now the site is back, revealing that it was all a hoax. According to the site: 'Now it's time we put an end to all the speculations once and for all. It's true that we decided that we couldn't keep GOG.com the way it was so we won't. As you probably know by now, GOG.com is entering its new era with an end of the two-years beta stage and we're launching a brand new GOG.com with new, huge releases.' So it was all an advertising stunt."

Coming from the UK, I can understand how people can be extradited on US federal law charges. I'd be surprised if state laws apply too.
For that matter how does this affect US citizens in say NY if the law is broken in CA?

Jamie Holyoake writes: "A flaw in Android OS means that the Apple ipad will obtain a vital foothold in the potential domination of the education sector Worldwide. Google have already lost a lot in potential revenue from the corporate sector as a lot of businesses have decided to avoid purchasing android phones for their employees because of the very same flaw:

Android OS has never allowed its users to configure global (or even browser) wi-fi proxy settings (which has been a base feature of Win Mobile, Apple, and even Symbian devices since long before the concept of Android was even released to the public). It has been an issue since the birth of Android and it was officially reported to Google developers (who must all have generous data plans) at code.google.com back on Nov 12 2009 (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1273).

The vast majority of education institutions (and a huge percentage of corporate environments) worldwide have some kind of proxy to get through in order to access the web. The ipad is proving to be a huge hit (as anyone might expect) and a fair amount of interest is being shown by education institutions globally where many are working towards the dream of replacing reference books and even work books with ipads especially at the secondary education level. So as it currently stands, Android tablet devices cannot even be considered as an alternative at these places due to this issue. Google really needs to pull their finger out and address this enormous flaw before Android can expect to be noted as a serious competitor.

However, in spite of the fact that Google have had over 6 months to address it and have more than 1000 very frustrated people jumping up and down (and that's just in the thread mentioned above alone), Google has seen fit to classify the issue as merely an "enhancement" of "medium" priority. Apparently no steps have been taken towards doing something about it in 2.1 Eclair or even 2.2 Froyo and we see cosmetic features like animated "live" wallpaper that apparently take priority over the basic functionality of enabling students and business people to connect to the outside world. Google has not as yet released any form of statement to its frustrated users to explain their reasons for neglecting the issue, or their plans (or lack thereof) to remedy the situation.

Many Android fans and network administrators that I know are in a position where they would like to recommend Android devices to colleagues, clients and friends but find that they are unable to due exclusively to the lack of proxy support for wi-fi connections. Furthermore, it is not a widely known flaw to potential buyers. Being such a standard feature to expect on any new device, many people have been stung by the realization of the fact after they have purchased an android device in good faith that no company in its right mind would allow an OS to be so far past intial beta stages and still not incorporate such a base line feature. This is leaving a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths and they are converting back to windows or apple powered devices with a reluctance to place their trust in Android so readily in the future. Google need to wake up and give the consumer real freedom of choice and a competitive product which isn't biased away from those people, places, and devices which are unable to rely on a sturdy mobile broadband connection or else consumer loyalties will be embedded elsewhere.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday February 18, 2010 @04:13AM
from the never-gonna-tell-a-lie-and-hurt-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference Wi-Fi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local Web server containing some Rick Roll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday January 23, 2009 @10:08PM
from the but-they're-so-friendly dept.

netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @06:07PM
from the f@#k-those-f@#king-f@#kers dept.

MBGMorden writes "It looks like in an act that defies common sense, a bill has been introduced in the South Carolina State Senate that seeks to outlaw the use of profanity. According to the bill it would become a felony (punishable by a fine up to $5000 or up to 5 years in prison) to 'publish orally or in writing, exhibit, or otherwise make available material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature.' I'm not sure if 'in writing' could be applied to the internet, but in any event this is scary stuff."

thrillseeker writes: According to the WSJ, Microsoft and Yahoo "are taking a fresh look at a merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their companies' respective strengths", in order to defend against the juggernaut of Google. Personally, I can ignore and not use either of them just as well combined as separate, but it probably makes sense to some executive somewhere.